Fagaala

The Jant-Bi dancers know how to fill a stage but the show lacks cohesion.Photo: Supplied

Fagaala,
Jant-bi Playhouse
Last Show 7.30 Tonight

THIS show by the Senegalese dance troupe Jant-Bi is impressive
in its energy and intensity. It is also puzzling.

One of the few points to emerge from the opaque wordiness of the
program notes is that the starting point for Fagaala (a
Senegalese word for "genocide") was a fictionalised account of the
massacre of hundreds of thousands of Tutsis by Hutus in Rwanda in
the 1990s. But Fagaala itself is so abstract and generalised
that it is hard to spot any visual references to violent death. The
powerful recorded sound accompaniment, often sinister, ominous and
unsettling, seems much more in tune with the work's ostensible
themes and story.

The choreography is a joint effort by Germaine Acogny, Jant-Bi's
artistic director, and Kota Yamazaki, who specialises in butoh, a
form of Japanese dance-theatre. Judging by examples staged here
over the past few decades, butoh is chiefly notable for its
mindless brutality, but that aspect of it is surprisingly subdued
in this reflection on mass murder.

The seven dancers, all men, know how to fill a stage  as
writhing, whirling individuals alone in the spotlight, as an
ensemble of soloists each doing his own thing, and as a team
performing in such tightly ordered formation that seven men become
a single twitching organism. And their way of making eye-contact
 alternately flirtatious, aggressive and despairing 
with the audience has a laser-like directness rarely achieved in
dance performances.

Fagaala is distinguished by an exciting range of movement
and pattern-making that, at its height, suggests a world gone mad.
Yet it lacks cohesion and emotional force because the
choreographers have only intermittently lifted their intentions out
of the program notes and on to the stage.